Message sent is that citizens should not be able to monitor the public actions of officials they employ

"If you don't give me your ID, then you're going to jail."

That's what a California cop, Officer Gabriel "Gabe" Lira, tells a man who is videotaping a routine traffic stop. For Daniel J. Saulmon who lives in Hawethorne, a suburb of Los Angeles west of Compton, he was simply doing his citizens duty. After all, his taxes help fund the Hawethorne Police Department, so why shouldn't he be allowed to record video of police in public on the job, in order to ensure that they do not abuse their citizen-entrusted power?

Instead they arrest him (as the tape clearly shows) for failing to produce ID. The only problem? There is no law in California banning recording of on-duty cops and there is no law that requires Californians to produce papers to cops. And in states where there are such laws, the requirement is that the individual be suspected of committing a crime.

Ultimately both charges were dropped. Mr. Saulmon's video, ironically, offered vindication by showing the officer improperly demanded his identification. It also showed he was standing a good distance away from the investigation site, and hence was not obstructing.

The extra irony is that the HPD officers should definitely have known better than to pick on Mr. Saulmon. Keenly aware of his rights, he regularly records local arrests. In 2005 he was arrested in a similar situation for eavesdropping/wiretapping. The charges were eventually dropped, and the HPD paid him a settlement of $25,000 USD for the wrongful arrest.

Mr. Saulmon is likely to pursue a similar settlement from the department this time around.

He tells the blog Photography is not a crime, "They knew exactly who I was. They always address me as ‘Mr. Saulmon'."

II. Justice for Some, But Not All

While the incident ended in vindication for the accused, other similar encounters across the country ended with little reprieve for the arrested videotaper. That's because some jurisidictions have banned citizens from recording local cops. The fight to overturn these verdicts may have been given a helping hand by the U.S. Attorney General, who penned a fiery response arguing that such arrests were unconstitutional. U.S. Circuit Appeals courts have ruled such taping to be well within a citizen's rights.

Some police organizations are still fighting to push back the current federal mandate and instead making taping cops a federal crime.

Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, argues that officers should not have to be held accountable and should be free to arrest citizens who try to monitor their activity for wrongdoing.

The Frateneral Order of Police says citizens should not be allowed to hold cops accountable when on the job in public. [Image Source: ACLU]

He comments, "They [police officers] need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be. We feel that anything that's going to have a chilling effect on an officer moving — an apprehension that he's being videotaped and may be made to look bad — could cost him or some citizen their life or some serious bodily harm."

Mark Donahue, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, agrees. He has stated in previous comments that his organization "absolutely supports" throwing those who tape police officers behind bars.

He complains that citizens monitoring police activities for wrongdoing might "affect how an officer does his job on the street."

I'll cite some examples of this "war" on whistle-blowing/demonstrating (Bradley Manning and Occupy Wall Street, respectively), and let's at least make sure we're not in a reverse-witch hunt. It would be highly dubious to simply state the above were within their respective civil rights.

Manning stole military data he was trusted with and put it into foreign hands (an Australian man if I remember correctly), which turned into a political propaganda video that was little more than a biased, uninformed attack on the war and cast U.S. soldiers as civilian murderers (actual study of the video showed armed insurgents). Now call Manning what you'd like to, but he should not be exonerated for "good intentions" of data theft and leaking. Replace his identity with that of a real foreign spy and the only difference is motive. Crime, meet punishment.

Do we even need to break down the utter mess that was Occupy Wall Street? The bio-hazard tent city washed in filth that harbored crime within its shanty town and wouldn't leave for weeks? The occupying and blocking of entrances to business and commerce and general disruption of peace? I believe the civil thing to do is peacefully assemble, not eat all the cake, piss on everything and set the world on fire.

I'm 100% behind being able to watch the watchers, report crimes anonymously and peaceful assembly, but people are way, way too narcissistic and naive today that the message is lost in a sea of black and gray morality. Ethics and responsibility and decency are long gone, and that is what a lot of civil people are against. We're supposed to fight for freedom, but not like lawless animals, yet some will go to their deaths believing "by any means necessary".

quote: Ever since Manning was accused of being the source for the WikiLeaks disclosures, those condemning these leaks have sought to distinguish them from Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers. With virtual unanimity, Manning’s harshest critics have contended that while Ellsberg’s leak was justifiable and noble, Manning’s alleged leaks were not; that’s because, they claim, Ellsberg’s leak was narrowly focused and devoted to exposing specific government lies, while Manning’s was indiscriminate and a far more serious breach of secrecy. When President Obama declared Manning guilty, he made the same claim: “No it wasn’t the same thing. Ellsberg’s material wasn’t classified in the same way.”

Ellsberg — dumped 7,000 pages of Top Secret documents : the highest known level of classification; by contrast, not a single page of what Manning is alleged to have leaked was Top Secret, but rather all bore a much lower-level secrecy designation. In that sense, Obama was right: “Ellsberg’s material wasn’t classified in the same way” — the secrets Ellsberg leaked were classified as being far more sensitive. To the extent one wants to distinguish the two leaks, Ellsberg’s was the far more serious breach of secrecy. The U.S. Government’s own pre-leak assessment of the sensitivities of these documents proves that. How can someone — in the name of government secrecy and national security — praise the release of thousands of pages of Top Secret documents while vehemently condemning the release of documents bearing a much lower secrecy classification? Nor is there any way to distinguish the substance of the two leaks.